Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/198

Rh 178 V E R V E R Versailles is the seat of a school of artillery and of a school for non-commissioned officers of the artillery and engineers. History. Louis XIII. often hunted in the woods of Versailles, and built a small pavilion at the corner of what is now the Hue de La Pompe and the avenue of St Cloud. In 1627 he entrusted Lemercier with the plan of a chateau, and in 1632 bought the land from Francis de Gondi, first archbishop of Paris, for 2640. In 1661 Levau made some additions, and in 1682 Louis XIV. took up his residence at Versailles, and gave Mansard orders to erect the great palace in which the original buildings disappeared. Fabulous sums were spent on the palace, gardens, and works of art, the accounts for which were destroyed by the king. Till his time the town was represented by a few houses to the south of the present Place d Armes ; but land was given to the lords of the court and new houses sprang up, chiefly in the north quarter. Under Louis XV. the parish of St Louis was formed to the south for the increas ing population, and new streets were built to the north on the meadows of Clagny, where in 1674 Mansard had built at Louis XIV. s orders a chateau for Madame de Montespan, which was now pulled down. Under Louis XVI. the town extended to the east and received a municipality ; in 1802 it gave its name to a bishopric. In 1783 the peace by which England recognized the independence of the United States was signed at Versailles. The states-general met here on 5th May 1789, and on 20th June took the solemn oath by which they bound themselves never to separate till they had given France a constitution, and which led to the riots of 5th and 6th October. Napoleon, Louis XVIII., and Charles X. merely kept up Versailles, but Louis Philippe restored its ancient splendour at the cost of 1,000,000. In 1870 and 1871 the town was the headquarters of the German army besieging Paris. After the peace Versailles was the seat of the French national assembly while the commune was triumphant in Paris, and of the two chambers till 1879, being declared the official capital of France. Versailles was the birthplace of Hoche, Abbe de 1 Epee, Philip V. of Spain, Louis XV., Louis XVI., Louis XVIII., Charles X., Count de Maurepas, Prince de Polignac, Marshal Berthier (Prince of Wagram), Houdon the sculptor, Ducis the poet, Callet the mathematician, and Ferdinand de Lesseps. (G. ME. ) VERSECZ, a royal free town in the county of Temes, Hungary, 40 miles south of Temesvar. It is partly for tified and is the seat of a Greek bishop. Amongst its principal institutions are a high college for girls, a gym nasium, and a real school. Versecz is one of the principal wine-producing centres in the kingdom, its yearly export amounting to an average of five and a half million gallons. There is also a good trade in rice and silk. The popula tion numbered 22,329 in 1880. VEETEBEATA TTERTEBRATA, the name of a great branch or phylum V of the Animal Kingdom which comprises those ani- La- mals having bony &quot; vertebrae &quot;, or pieces of bone jointed marck s so as to form a spinal column. The first recognition of d. , the group is due to Lamarck (1797), who united the four classing highest classes of Linnaeus s system as &quot;animaux a verte- catious. bres,&quot; whilst distinguishing the rest of the animal world as &quot;animaux sans vertebres.&quot; The same union of the four Linnaean classes had been previously made by Batsch in 1788, who, however, proposed for the great division thus constituted the name &quot; Knochenthiere.&quot; The significance of Lamarck s classification was materially altered, and the foundation laid of our present attempts to represent by our classifications the pedigree of the animal kingdom, when Cuvier propounded his doctrine of &quot;types,&quot; and re cognized the Vertebrata as one of four great types or plans of structure to be distinguished in the animal world (z). 1 The Vertebrata of Lamarck and Cuvier included beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes, and until recently the group was considered as one of the most sharply limited in the animal kingdom. The progress of anatomical studies very soon rendered it clear that all Vertebrata did not possess bony vertebrae ; for, besides the commoner sharks and skates, with their purely cartilaginous skeletons, natu ralists became acquainted with the structure of fishes, such as the sturgeons and the lampreys, which possess no verte brae at all, but merely a continuous elastic rod (the noto chord) in the place of the jointed spinal column. The muscles and their skeletal septa were seen in these fishes to be arranged in a series of segments attached to the sides of this continuous rod ; and hence the structural character of bony vertebrae, as distinguishing the Vertebrata, gave place to the character of segmental arrangement of the muscles of the body-wall, such muscles being supported by a skeletal axis which might be itself unsegmented (notochord), or replaced by segmental cartilaginous or bony Essential vertebrae. The studies of embryologists furnished a sound struc- foundation for this conception by demonstrating that in tares of ^ Q embryos of Vertebrata with true vertebrae these struc- brates. tur es are preceded by an unsegmented continuous noto chord. The inquiry into the structural characteristics of Vertebrata led further to the recognition of several addi tional points of structure, the combination of which was present only in the group which had been recognized by Lamarck on superficial grounds. It was found that all 1 These numerals refer to the bibliography at the end of the article. Vertebrata possess laterally-placed passages leading from the pharynx to the exterior, serving in the aquatic forms as the exits for water taken in by the mouth, and provided with vascular branchial processes, whilst in the embryos of the higher air-breathing classes they appear only as temporary structures. It was further established that the great mass of nervous tissue lying dorsally above the spinal column, and known as the cerebro- spinal nerve- centre or brain and spinal cord, is in all cases a tube, and originates as part of the dorsal surface of the embryo, which becomes depressed in the form of a long groove and finally closed in by the adhesion of its opposite edges, thus forming a tube or canal. The three structures, noto chord, gill-slits, and tubular dorsal nerve-cord,- were more than twenty years ago recognized as characterizing, together with the metameric segmentation of the musculature of the body-wall, all Vertebrata at some one or other period of their existence. The establishment by Darwin of the doctrine of organic Questior evolution in 1859 led naturalists consciously to make the ot Vei:te attempt to determine the genetic affinities and the probable ancestry of the various groups of animals, and enabled them to recognize in the classifications by &quot; type &quot;, and other such conceptions of earlier systematists, the uncon scious striving after genealogical representation of the relationships of organic beings. The question naturally arose in regard to the Vertebrata, as in regard to other great divisions of the animal kingdom, What were the characters of the earliest forms, the ancestors of those now living? Then came the further questions as to whether any surviving Vertebrata closely resemble the ancestral form, and whether any animals are still in existence which retain the general characters of those primeval forms which were the common ancestors at once of Vertebrates and of other large and equally well-marked phyla or branches of the animal kingdom, such as the Molluscs, the Annulates, &c. This fascinating subject of inquiry received its most important impulse from the embryological investi gations of the Russian naturalist Kowalewsky, and has been for nearly a quarter of a century the fertile source of speculation and its indispensable accompaniments, new observation and research. Kowalewsky published in 1866 an account of the embryology of the lowest and simplest of then recognized Vertebrates, the lancelet (Amphioxus lanceolatus), in which he attempted to trace, cell for cell from the fertilized egg-cell, the origin of the characteristic